I am an evil giraffe. Who no longer blogs about politics.

The White House believes that Congress’s 2002 authorization of the Iraq war — and not just the 2001 authorization to fight Al Qaeda — provides a legal justification for President Obama’s air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Obama administration said Friday.

Via Instapundit, who is probably likewise feeling invigorated right now. Who needs stimulants, when you have schadenfreude?

PS: I understand that it is fashionable – more accurately, a fad – to assert that George W Bush was a horrible bungler who prosecuted the most disastrous war in American history. I do not ask that sufferers from that delusion read more broadly on American military history; I simply note that said sufferers should.

It may well be that the United States will go to war with Iraq. But if so, it should be because we have to — not because we want to. For the American people to accept the legitimacy of this conflict and give their consent to it, the Bush administration must first present detailed evidence of the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and then prove that all other avenues of protecting our nation’s security interests have been exhausted.

Allahpundit, while discussing this week’s knife fight in an alleyway among the caucus, caustically comments:

Maybe each side’s ideological principles are basically only as sturdy as the support they get from charismatic leaders at the top. Ask an anti-war Obama voter about that, if you can still find one.

…Ouch. I keep forgetting just how comprehensively the antiwar movement lost the argument. They lost so badly, in fact, that it’s hard to remember there was ever a point where there was a faint possibility that they could win.

“Neoconservative” and “neocon” have become terms of abuse, denoting right-wing extremism. But the original neoconservatives began mostly as left-leaning intellectuals who only deserted the Democratic Party after it fell under the influence of the counterculture during the Vietnam War. With Barack Obama about to become president, is there any chance neoconservatives will finally return to the roost?